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Sunday, July 22, 2012

Manufacturing Woes

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

new technology is driving a U.S. industrial comeback...... Seduced by government subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, U.S. industry has rushed to China in recent decades, with millions of American jobs lost...... Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. ..... The factory assembly that China is currently performing is child's play compared to the next generation of robots -- which will soon become cheaper than human labor. ..... artificial intelligence (AI) -- software that makes computers, if not intelligent in the human sense, at least good enough to fake it..... AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as the iPhone's Siri, and Face.com, the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired..... a "creator economy" in which mass production is replaced by personalized production, with people customizing designs they download from the Internet or develop themselves. ..... Three-D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. ..... in the next decade, manufacturing will again become a local industry and it will be possible to 3D print electronics and use giant 3D printing scaffolds to print entire buildings. Why would we ship raw materials all the way to China and then ship completed products back to the United States when they can be manufactured more cheaply locally, on demand? .... advances in nanotechnology that change the equation further. .... carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers .... stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable ..... "Over the next two decades," Jacobstein says, "molecular manufacturing will do for our relationship with molecules and matter what the computer did for our relationship with bits and information -- make the precise control of molecules and matter inexpensive and ubiquitous." .... America's ability to innovate, demolish old industries, and continually reinvent itself. The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven't cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.....Google just announced that it will produce its highly-acclaimed Nexus 7 tablet in the United States.